


Ruined

by Mstorms



Category: Panic! at the Disco
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-28
Updated: 2016-01-28
Packaged: 2018-05-16 19:09:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,134
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5837527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mstorms/pseuds/Mstorms
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Hi, This is my first fanfiction ever, so I apologize for the shit quality. I hope you don't hate it too much. I have another part that I'll try to update in the next few days.</p>
    </blockquote>





	Ruined

**Author's Note:**

> Hi, This is my first fanfiction ever, so I apologize for the shit quality. I hope you don't hate it too much. I have another part that I'll try to update in the next few days.

Ruined

Brendon couldn’t relate, well, not really. It was a need for power, a need to be in control of every situation at hand. Before concerts and albums and Pete Wentz and everything, it has still been about Ryan. Brendon was pretty sure in a way, Panic would always be about Ryan Ross. Years after it all, the boy with words too long for his own comprehension and honey hair would still be the epitome of Panic! At The Disco. Sometimes, he could forget about how Ryan was always so controlling. It was easy to forget about it when so many advantages and opportunities were given to them because Ryan made Brendon practice the bridge in Camisado an innumerable amount of times before his AP Chemistry exam the next day. It seemed to pay off in the long run. Ryan, no matter how much of a pain he was to them, was always worth it.

If Brendon would have to speculate, he would guess it was because of his dad. Brendon might have been a little sheltered growing up, sure, but he still knew the signs. When Brendon kind of, but not really, was kicked out of his house and forced to live in that shitty apartment seemingly miles away from any decent civilization, Ryan’s pain began to embody him. On the days Ryan would show to that shithole at odd times of the night begging, not with words, no, Ryan would never be able to say the words, to be let in, Brendon would see it; a bruise piled at the wrist or the scratch on the back that he wasn’t sure ended above his waist on those rare occasions Brendon would get a glimpse of him without a clad chest. That was all he ever got, but it was enough. Brendon didn’t bring it up. Part of him wish he did, but he knew better. It wouldn’t heal anything, it would just remind Ryan to go to someone else’s place next time.

Maybe Brendon liked it a little to know that somebody had it worse than him. Although Brendon had been told to live on his own, he wasn’t really alone, and he knew it. His parents still payed for the van’s car insurance and he was still listed on his parents’ medical bills. They sent him food several times a week and they came to visit to make sure he was okay and healthy. His parents still loved him, and they always would. It’s not like it was a particular surprise to anyone that Brendon wasn’t a practicing Mormon, his parents had to know for years. Maybe they knew about that time Brendon was thirteen and had for the first time left the house at an indecent hour, only to come home with wrinkled clothes and a broken virtue. Maybe they knew that the day after his fifteenth birthday, he didn’t have a headache because he got sick overnight. Maybe they knew what Brendon did on the weekends and maybe they knew about what Brendon hid in his sock drawer. It wouldn’t have changed anything. As long as Brendon pretended, they would have played along as well. When Brendon told them the truth, well the Atheist part, they didn’t seem horribly devastated or even horribly shocked. Maybe they just figured that out of their five children, one of them was bound to be a fuck up. 

Ryan’s life could never be that simple. He had learned to be by himself for most of his childhood and it was easy for people to forget that he was still a child. Ryan learned that he couldn’t scream back, so he wrote about it instead. He knew he couldn’t cry, so he rebelled in innocent sounding remarks. He knew what would happen to him if he stayed in Las Vegas with a father who would never truly care for him, so he took the band as an escape route. Everything had to be perfect because there was no other way. It was either the band succeeding or certain death for Ryan. Everyone in Panic knew this a little so they didn’t try to challenge it. Not even Brendon, who spent hundreds of hours blending frozen drinks for the slim chance that Panic would succeed, wanted it as bad as Ryan. 

Ryan became addicted to the idea of the band. He wouldn’t sleep normally or eat or even think if the band wasn’t in a secure place. Brendon had thought it was weird at first. He never wanted something so bad, he would never give up everything for such an indefinite. He could still breathe without the band, he would still live without it. He wasn’t sure that was the same for Ryan. It was the first addiction Brendon had seen Ryan acquire. It wouldn’t be the last, no. As long as Ryan was there, he was always working toward something bigger than himself. He would let it take over him, because in some way, he needed to be controlled by something as much as he needed to control. After the band it would be their image. After that was secured it became the Beatles and then it was the drugs and maybe it was Brendon in the end. Brendon didn’t want to think that though. He liked to believe that he was more than another one of Ryan’s addictions, but maybe that would be a lie. He wouldn’t know. It was funny how little he actually knew. Maybe he really did know, but it was just easier not to.

Back before the break up and the drugs and their first albums release and even the kiss, there was the promise. Like everything back then, it was Ryan’s idea. One minute Brendon was at his ramshackle apartment lying on the single mattress placed in the middle of his kitchen just trying to get three hours of sleep before he had to attend school the next day and then Ryan was there, a knife in hand and a smile on his worn down face. His hair was dirty and he looked tired When Brendon looked at him, he didn’t see the control freak with an annoying God Complex that everybody else saw, but a kid who never got the chance to grow up. Maybe he was eighteen, but he had been eighteen for too long. He had been eighteen when his father sold his first guitar to pay for the mortgage, he had been eighteen when his mom left the house and never came back, and he had been eighteen when nobody attended his third grade play, but maybe right now, he could be a child. Maybe that was all Ryan ever wanted.

That was why Brendon didn’t yell at Ryan to go fuck off and leave him to sleep. He couldn’t do that. He couldn’t break the boy with the glass heart’s smile. Nobody would be left to glue back the pieces. Instead of a fist, he gave Ryan a smile. He wiped the sleep out his eyes and patted for Ryan to take a seat next to him on the severely dilapidated mattress. Ryan took it gratefully and helped pulled Brendon into a sitting stance. Their faces were a few inches away from each other and Ryan’s eyes glittered with the excitement of a child on Christmas. The glitter of innocence and hope and something that was so far gone from Brendon that he couldn’t even begin to fathom it. If Ryan were to take the knife in his hand and plunge it into Brendon’s abdomen, it would make more sense than how anyone who went through so much could look at the world with so much wonder.

“What are you doing with that?” Brendon asked, his eyes cast to the silver knife. His voice was soft and quiet. Everything was way too intimate for three in the morning and Brendon wasn’t sure he was currently in reality and not in a surreal dream.

Ryan’s smile widened as he held up the knife in the small space between their faces. “We are going to make a promise.” 

Brendon laughed slightly in laughter. Brendon had dealt with some weird shit in his life, but he had never before had a blood oath. “Why the hell would we do that?”

“Because” Ryan said, the glisten still in his eyes. “I’ve never done it and it would be cool.”

Brendon was less than convinced. “Um Ryan that would not be ‘cool’. It would hurt.”

“It would hurt, but only for a minute. It would be a bond. A promise to the band. You know, the whole thing that nothing is stronger than blood.”

Brendon snorted. “This is how people get AIDS.”

Brendon for the life of him can’t remember how exactly Ryan coaxed him into slitting a line through the palm of his hand with the only usable knife in his kitchen, but he does remember their hands pressed against each other, their bloods combined in a swirl of bad decisions and all the slight pain that seemed to permeate its way through his arm. It didn’t matter though, that was the thing. When he was with Ryan, nothing really mattered. It wasn’t necessary a good thing, it fact, it might have been a vice. In four years when Brendon would be left without a bassist and his best friend and he wondered how the hell it could have ended so terribly, he would think of Ryan’s blood forever mixed with his and how maybe if Brendon would have just shut the door on Ryan…no. Brendon regretted a lot of things, but he could never regret how he let the boy with sadness in his eyes and a knife in his hand forever into his blood. He couldn’t ever regret that. It might have been the only selfless thing Brendon did for him. 

Maybe nothing else would have happened if that didn’t. Maybe that’s why when Ryan turned into a dictator and forced the band to practice until their fingers were numb and Brendon’s voice was reduced to nothing but murmurs of pain, he didn’t give up. Maybe that’s why when Ryan forced Brendon into a carousel ride of confusion and hypotheticals, Brendon didn’t raise his hands in surrender and go back. It was because for every time Ryan left Brendon because he couldn’t deal with the truth, there was a Seattle in the rain. For every time that Ryan hooked up with some girl that looked nearly identical to the previous one, there was midnight in that god forsaken park. In short, Brendon was so entranced with Ryan, he knew leaving would never even be an option. All Brendon ever wished for was that in return. 

Maybe the final nail in the coffin was the kiss. In his memories, he always recounted the kiss as dreamy and a melodious affair that left Brendon breathless and enchanted, but he knew better. At most, the kiss was average. Brendon wasn’t expecting it and it caught him so much off guard that he didn’t even have time to close his mouth in the three second duration of which their lips touched. Brendon was just talking to Ryan about the freaking weather of all things and all of a sudden, Ryan’s lips were pressed firmly against his and the world momentarily stopped. Then Ryan drew his lips back and ran out of the diner with tears in his eyes. Brendon was left alone with half of a chocolate milkshake, a side order of the world’s worst fries, and a heart that was already deemed broken.

He found Ryan sitting on a lopsided swing in an abandoned playground. They were both nineteen and three hours away from a city that was no longer home. The sky had begun to cry and Ryan’s converse were soaked with mud. Maybe the tears of the clouds were more of pity for sadness. Brendon sat a blue swing adjacent to Ryan’s and pushed off the ground, heading toward the grief stricken sky. As he fell backward to the floor of soil, he caught a glimpse of Ryan. 

He looked like a broken toy.

Brendon quickly looked away because it was always easier to look away than to deal with pain. His eyes adverted to the sky where the sun had locked itself in a veil of clouds. Brendon wondered for a moment if the sun would ever reappear. Still, he continued to reach his legs out further as if the covered sun was merely an arms width away. He at one point attempted to reach for it, but he was painfully ripped away from it as he felt the heat radiate off the tip of his fingers. It seemed every time he swung forward, he would get closer and closer, but he would never be close enough. Suddenly, he heard the swing next to him creak and he no longer felt the need to touch the sun. 

They stayed silent for a few minutes. Brendon was pretty sure it was the loudest silence he has ever felt. He couldn’t be sure about that, though. 

“You know we’re married now.” Ryan said eventually as their thrusts were parallel to each other.

“So we are, Ryan Ross.” Brendon said with a lopsided grin and a wink. 

 

Ryan grinned back, and suddenly the rain pouring from the sky no longer seemed melancholy. Brendon knew that everything was going to be okay.

Brendon kind of forgot about the kiss. It was easy to do when thinking about it hurt so much. A month ensued and Brendon was sure that the whole thing was just a mirage of what if. Well, almost. Brendon no longer saw Ryan wear his converse high tops he used to wear religiously. 

It wasn’t until Brendon was pinned against the wall of a dirty room in a Motel 8 with Ryan against him that Brendon was able to fully remember that the kiss did, in fact, happen. That time, though, was too late. Ryan was already attached to his lips and it stung in a way that would leave Brendon’s lips bruised in the days that ensued. Ryan was the first to pull away, but this time he made no effort to move. He muttered something into Brendon’s ear and it took Brendon a minute to even process that Ryan was speaking.

“I had never done that before, you know?” He said. His voice was husky for such an effeminate sounding boy. Brendon didn’t tell Ryan that though. He was pretty sure Ryan wouldn’t appreciate that. 

“Did what?”

“You know…kiss a guy.” Ryan replied. He attached himself to Brendon’s neck and it hurt. It never really stopped hurting. “Have you?”

“Have I what?” Brendon asked absentmindedly before it clicked. “Oh kissed a guy? Yeah, of course. Those are things you experience when you don’t lock yourself in your room until you are eighteen.”

Ryan bit down on his neck.

“Ow! What the fuck Ryan.” Brendon screeched. It really hurt. 

“Can you please just shut up?”

Brendon obliged. He was never really good at shutting up, but that was one of the few exceptions.

On the countless nights Brendon has spent thinking of that night, he always remembers the immense pain. It wasn’t Brendon’s first time with a guy or anything, but it had never hurt like that before. Everybody before Ryan had at least cared a little about how Brendon felt, even in a drunken stupor. Ryan was nothing like that, though. It wasn’t even that he was trying to be malicious. It was more like that was all he thought sex worked. Like the goal was for one to feel pain instead of pleasure. Brendon didn’t say anything, because he didn’t know any better. Thinking back, that was the worst part about it. That Ryan was so rough and unloving. That Ryan legitimately thought at a time that it was normal to bleed. Brendon thought back to Ryan’s bruised arms and hips and he couldn’t help but to shutter. Brendon was glad he never asked any questions. 

In the morning, Ryan freaked out again. He swore to a God he knew didn’t exist that he wasn’t gay. He cried and had a tantrum and when they got back on their tour bus, he avoided Brendon. That hurt a lot more than the night prior. Brendon didn’t have the energy to comfort Ryan. He was pretty sure no one did, and he was pretty pissed. One time was normal, but Brendon couldn’t handle it twice. He couldn’t be someone’s experiment. It wasn’t fair to him. Brendon at least deserved that much. 

Eventually Spencer was the one who came to comfort Brendon. To this day, Brendon isn’t sure how he found out the night prior, but that was besides the fact. Spencer simply sat next to Brendon and rolled up a joint. He inhaled it for a minute and then handed it to Brendon. Brendon took it graciously and pressed it to his lips. 

“Ryan’s a dick.” Spencer said simply.

A cruel laugh escaped Brendon. “Yeah, I kind of figured that one on my own.” He inhaled the joint once again, letting the fumes dance against him bruised lips.

“He wasn’t always like that. Well, he was, but not to the extent of how he is now.” Spencer began. “I know you can’t blame one’s bad behavior solely on how they grew up, but it was tough for Ryan. I think when his mom left, it destroyed him. He like stopped smiling and wouldn’t ever come out of his house anymore. After a while, he got over it and then all that shit with his dad happened and he was back to square one. His dad’s such an asshole, but Ryan like worshipped him at a time. When he got into drinking and all that shit, it tore him apart. I know what Ryan did was wrong, but he doesn’t mean for it to happen like that. It doesn’t justify it, but I don’t think anything ever will.” 

Brendon still thinks of where everything went wrong, but in all honesty, he knows the answer. It wasn’t like anything went wrong, it was just inherently wrong to begin with. Brendon might as well have been injecting himself with poison because the results would have been the same. Nothing was ever okay, and nothing would ever change that. He couldn’t just drop Ryan though. It didn’t matter that Ryan would slowly kill him, Brendon just didn’t care. There would be a thousand more instances where Ryan would continue to inject poison further and further into Brendon’s veins, but by that time, it wouldn’t matter. After the first kiss, the first fuck, Brendon was already irrevocably ruined.


End file.
